Ronald S. Stroud

Ronald Sidney Stroud (July 8, 1933 – October 7, 2021) succumbed after a lengthy hospitalization that followed a fall in his Berkeley home. A long time and much honored Professor of Classics at UC Berkeley, he leaves a very large gap for his admiring colleagues, a host of former students, and an extraordinary number of friends across the world who have expressed their affection and grief.

Ron Stroud was born and grew up in Toronto, Canada. His early years gave little sign of the distinguished career that was in store. His passions lay primarily in sports in which he shone as an athlete, whether basketball, football, baseball, and, of course, hockey. He and his younger brother Barry Stroud (who became an eminent professor of philosophy at Berkeley and who predeceased him) competed fiercely at a high level in sports. Ron even played semi-pro baseball and made the freshman basketball team at the University of Toronto. In both high school and college, he built up strength and earned pocket money by working on farms, a lumber camp, and putting up telegraph lines.

A critical turning point came when a high school Latin teacher, who also taught him Greek on the side, inspired Ron to pursue work in the Classics. He obtained his BA in 1957 at the University of Toronto and then won a Teaching Assistantship at Berkeley that allowed him to begin graduate studies under the incomparable scholar W. Kendrick Pritchett and to proceed to the PhD. In the midst of those graduate years, he had the great good fortune (well earned) to obtain a Thomas Day Seymour Fellowship in 1959 to the American School of Classical Studies, an institution to which he became devoted and in which he was a key figure for his entire career. Ron made his mark swiftly, gaining appointment as Secretary of the School, an office he held from 1960 through 1963. It was the beginning of a long and most productive relationship with the School.

Ron returned to Berkeley to complete his PhD in 1965, was then appointed to a faculty position in the Department of Classics (now Ancient Greek and Roman Studies), and taught there through his entire career. His commitment to the department and to the campus until his retirement in 2007 was unrelenting. He served as chair of Classics from 1975 to 1977. He was one of the founders in 1968 of the Interdisciplinary Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology (AHMA) and for several years held the post of Graduate Advisor of the Group. He helped to steer it to its position as the premier program of its kind in the nation. He was also a central figure in founding the Sara B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy in 1999 which cemented the reputation of Berkeley as one of the leading epigraphical centers in the world.

In addition to his contributions to his home campus, Ron became an esteemed and beloved figure at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. He spent almost every summer in Greece, excavating at Corinth, tirelessly touring the countryside, and engaging with Greek scholars as well others from all over the world. In Athens he held the prestigious posts both of Whitehead Professor (1993-1994) and Mellon Professor (1996-1999). In the latter role he displayed his remarkable conscientiousness and his exhaustive preparation to a degree that almost proved fatal. Arriving early in the season to examine one of the few areas of Greece with which he was not fully acquainted, Ron tumbled down a precipitous hill in Boeotia, causing severe damage to himself, including even a broken neck. Through extraordinary determination he managed to escape death and land in a hospital where he recuperated for months in a body brace. His resourcefulness and toughness permitted him to overcome this setback and carry out his responsibilities as Mellon Professor for three years, to the great benefit of students and visitors. Ron Stroud was a genuine philhellene, with a deep love of the country, its inhabitants, its language, and its cultural treasures.

Few scholars could match Stroud’s combination of skills and expertise in Greek history, historiography, epigraphy, topography, and archaeology. In epigraphy he stood at the pinnacle of the profession. For more than a quarter century he was the principal editor of the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum, the annual volumes recording the publication of new Greek inscriptions, with texts, critical apparatus, and bibliography, a vital resource for the profession. His own publications of inscriptions set a standard for meticulousness, thoroughness, and sound judgment. Among the most important was his magisterial editio princeps of The Athenian Grain-Tax Law of 374/3 (1998), a model of its kind with its scrupulous scholarship and its rich, learned commentary. A reviewer of one of his books called him “the most skilled and sage Athenian epigrapher alive today.” Stroud’s monumental work, The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore : Architecture and Topography (1997), with Nancy Bookidis, the fruit of thirty years of excavation at Corinth, set on a firm basis our understanding of the cult and ritual practiced in the sanctuary. After another decade and a half in Corinth he produced an additional superb and definitive volume, The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore: The Inscriptions (2013), thus demonstrating that his skill and productivity had not diminished even at the end of his eighth decade.

Ron Stroud has been the recipient of countless awards and honors, eloquent testimony to his distinguished career. He obtained a Guggenheim fellowship, and held a Visiting Fellowship in King’s College in 1977/78. He was appointed to an endowed chair at Berkeley (the Klio Distinguished Professorship of Classical Languages and Literature) in 2001. He received the Berkeley Citation for distinguished achievement and notable service to the university in 2006. His countless services to the American School in Athens received due acknowledgment on two separate occasions. In 2013 he received the “Aristeia Award”, the highest honor bestowed upon an alumnus of the School for support of its teaching and research mission. The School reaffirmed its gratitude in 2018 by awarding him the “Athens Prize” for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of knowledge of ancient Greece. And its leaders topped even this by naming a room in its new student center after him in 2021, a decision fortunately known to Ron before his death. Further still, Ron enjoyed the admiration and affection of countless Greek colleagues, who duly expressed their appreciation with the publication in 2015 of a two volume Festschrift, AXON: Studies in Honor of Ronald S. Stroud. Even this extraordinary collection of honors, impressive though it be, did not match, in Ron’s own estimation, the wonderful gift given him by students and friends in 2003 to commemorate his 70^th birthday: an honorific decree in ancient Greek on a pedimental stele, made of Pentelic marble, which has become a landmark in the beautiful garden of the Strouds’ home.

The acclaim bestowed upon Ron Stroud’s scholarship has its counterpart in the plaudits earned by his teaching. He was a rigorous and exacting mentor of graduate students, but always generous, encouraging, and warm. As one of his former graduate students put it, his “commitment to graduate students was a constant, and was manifest above all in his generosity, manifest also in the time he spent guiding students’ through the degree . . . he gently guided students, but with a firm hand.” Reference to his generosity and his gentle guidance recurs in the comments. As another former PhD student stated, “he quietly took the measure of our interests and helped us find a path that would sustain us on our journey, be it a journey of the next several years or of a whole career.” Ron served on the dissertation committees of at least fifty graduate students who went on to successful academic careers. Nor did he ever neglect undergraduates. His life-long commitment to teaching and to the campus is no better exemplified than by the fact that, in addition to many advanced courses, he taught beginning Greek throughout his career. Few scholars of his stature and seniority would be in that rare company.

Ron’s life and career enjoyed the loving and indispensable companionship of his wife Helen (Connie) for nearly sixty years. She met him in Athens when she was a research assistant at the School in 1961 and they were married there in 1963, first in the British consulate and then in the Anglican Church (Ron’s Canadian citizenship provided access). The two shared countless trips to Greece, collaboration in excavations, and innumerable visits to sites and museums. Connie was also instrumental in nursing Ron through his lengthy hospitalization in Greece. Ron’s immeasurable debt to Connie received the most moving expression in his acceptance speech for the Aristea Award. “Without Connie, there would never have been an Aristeia Award for Ron Stroud.” That brought the assemblage to tears.

Ron Stroud leaves a long and lasting legacy to Connie, his children, Melissa and Richard, and his four grandchildren, Eliza, Charlotte, RJ, and Henry, to his beloved university, to his equally beloved Greece, to his numerous students, and to countless friends and admirers around the world.

Erich S. Gruen
Gladys Rehard Wood Professor (Emeritus)
2022